A Face at the Window (6 page)

Frustrated, she poured cold coffee, dumped it after a bitter sip, then spied the note she'd written to herself, reminding her to pick Lee up from the baby-sitter's at eleven-thirty.

It was now ten forty-five. She touched her fingertips to her lips; should she even bring Lee back here at all?

But then she frowned. "All right. Get hold of yourself," she said aloud. "Call Bob Arnold and let him know what's happened."

So she did, getting put through first to the dispatcher and then to Bob's voice mail because it wasn't an emergency.
Keeping her voice even, she described Ozzie Campbell's call, then phoned the baby-sitter, Helen Nevelson. Her machine picked up:

"Hi! This is Helen. If I'm not answering, I've probably got my hands full with your kid. So leave your number, call us again later, or come on over and join us…bye!"

The girl's cheerful voice made Jake feel better, and the day-care place itself, set on a hidden cul-de-sac in Eastport's North End section, would be nearly impossible for Ozzie Campbell or any other stranger to find. Besides, three hours from Bangor and light-years from anywhere else…Eastport was surely too far for even that creep Campbell to come, just because he was in a snit.

Wasn't it?

In Jake's old
house, the previous owners did repairs with whatever materials they had handy. Wooden windows got fixed up with bathtub caulk, pictures dangled crookedly from hammered-in metal screws, and sticking doors were rejiggered by the simple method of hacking off a rough quarter inch or so at the bottom.

Thus the neat, well-organized bins, shelves, and racks of Wadsworth's Hardware Store on Water Street had the same effect on her as photos of delicious food might have on a starving person, especially if they were accompanied by scratch-n-sniff cards for turpentine, leather work gloves, and sweeping compound.

"Morning, Jake. What's the project for today?" Tom Godley poked his graying head from behind a stack of cardboard cartons in the delivery area of the store.

"Concrete," she replied as the scent of 3-IN-ONE oil joined the other perfumes wafting into her head. "That sidewalk."

He nodded silently. "I need a couple of bags of sand, one of gravel…" Tom had already begun writing on a yellow pad. "…one of those plastic mixing troughs, but not a trowel, because my dad has one of those—"

Tom looked up. "If your dad's anything like my dad you don't want to mess with his tools."

"Right. A mixing trowel, then." She hadn't intended to come to the hardware store at all, but as she was hastily setting up wooden sawhorses to guard against anybody else falling into the sidewalk hole, the baby-sitter had called back.

And all was well, not one single unusual thing had happened, and anyway, Helen was a capable girl, Jake reminded her self. Lee was having her snack, no strangers had phoned or visited… and the call from Campbell had been distressing, but nothing worse. So Jake had decided to leave well enough alone and pick the child up at the usual time.

Finished with her order, Tom Godley went back to unloading cardboard cartons: claw hammers, whisk brooms, fuses, saw blades, a nail gun, two coal scuttles, and a box of mothballs were noted against a packing slip, priced with a label gun, and placed on the shelves with the other essential items Wadsworth's carried.

"We'll send the stuff up on the truck this afternoon, okay?" he said. "Too heavy for you to haul."

"Yes,
thanks." Once dubbed the empty-building capital of the world, Eastport was now full of old-house fix-up folks who liked good architecture and relatively cheap real estate, both of which the town had lots of, so the work truck went out twice a day.

"Follow the instructions," said Tom. "Don't rush. Build it up in layers like interior plaster. Too thick and it'll crack so don't slop it on all at once. But you know that by now, I guess."

She did, but Tom could never resist. "Once you get it laid in
there, spray it and lay a tarp over it. You cut the concrete out wider at the bottom already?"

She nodded, but apparently not firmly enough. "It should be like a pyramid, lots wider at the base," he said. "So the shape locks the new material in place."

He plucked a wide chisel from a shelf. "Masonry tool," he said. "Your dad's probably got one of these, too."

Over his years of being a fugitive from justice—or in his case, injustice-Jacob Tiptree had become an expert stonemason; it was a job he could travel with, never staying more than a few weeks or months in any one place, and best of all, a stonemason often got paid in cash.

She let Tom add the chisel to the list. "Keep it all nice and moist, but not wet," he added.

Pocketing her change, Jake planned to attack the sidewalk hole again later in the day, when Lee was down for a nap. As for Campbell's call, she'd be hearing from Bob Arnold and Sandy O’Neill soon, and now that she'd had the baby-sitter's reassuring report she decided to wait and see what they both thought before getting into any kind of a panic.

A decent plan…but what Tom said next threw a monkey wrench into it. "Coupla fellas in here asking about you, earlier."

At the end of the fish pier across the street the red-sailed schooner
Sylvina Beal
was taking on a party of whale-watchers for a trip out into the Bay of Fundy Hampers full of lunch got handed over the rail, and coolers full of refreshment followed.

"Really?" She turned in alarm. "Asking what?"

Through the big plate-glass window behind the cash register, Tom watched the landlubbers make their way gingerly down the steep metal gang toward the
Sylvina's
foredeck. "Whether or not I knew you, anything about you. The one guy had a snapshot of you."

She swallowed hard. "Who were they? And what'd you say?"

"Told ‘em what I always do," said Tom, "when someone I don't know comes snoopin’ around asking questions about somebody I do."

He mimed zipping his lip. "Young fellas. Sam's friends, at first I thought. But they didn't mention him."

"What'd they look like?" Campbell was in his early sixties.

He shrugged. "Twentyish, in T-shirts and jeans. Didn't pay ‘em a lot of attention at first. City boys. Gold chains and some fancy wristwatch one of ‘em had on. I do remember that."

It was still just barely possible that this was nothing. "Thanks, Tom. I appreciate your not telling them where to find me. I like a heads-up before I get company, you know?"

Tom nodded, turning his attention to a woman buying a lot of paint scrapers and sandpaper as Jake rushed out.

On the street, crowds of tourists lent a holiday atmosphere to the brilliant day. Folks dressed in new-looking L.L. Bean gear peered into shop windows; cars bearing out-of-state plates eased slowly along, searching for parking spots, and kids wearing tiny baseball caps skipped back and forth atop the granite break water.

"Excuse me, but do you know where I can find a restaurant that serves—?"

Lobster,
the pleasant lady in the white straw hat was going to finish; tourists here always did. And the answer this late in the season was nowhere; August was molting season for the clawed delicacies, their shells thin as paper now and the meat beneath unappetizing. But Jake didn't give it.

"I'm sorry, I'm in a hurry," she interrupted, getting into her car; the nice lady looked affronted.
So much for that famous down-east Maine hospitality.

Jake didn't care, and was about to punctuate her rudeness with a squeal of tires as she backed out of her parking spot. But instead Billie Whitson's silver MG pulled up fast behind her and stopped, blocking her exit.

"Hoo-hoo!" Billie called, getting out and hurrying to Jake's driver's side window. "I mean it, Jake," she said, hooking her long, red nails atop the partly open car window as if she could claw her way in.

"I'm showing properties nonstop," she added impatiently, "and I know you think you don't want to sell. But what if you got a great offer?"

Which was the main thing Billie had figured out about Eastport: that it
wasn't
Carmel, California. People here had lost just about every possible way to make a living: fish, factories, shipbuilding. They needed money, and Billie convinced them their only hope of getting any was to list the family home, at a price that to them looked like oceans of cash but was really a joke.

Then she promptly sold it out from under them to people from away, pocketed the commission plus "expenses," and left the sellers to the coldly dawning realization that what they'd gotten for their place wouldn't even make a down payment on a home anywhere else.

Or here, either, now that Billie was jacking up everyone's expectations. "Get your fingers out of my window," Jake grated, stabbing the Up button with one of her own.

When Eastport's other real estate agents discussed Billie, they wore the sour expressions they usually reserved for visiting looky-loos who had no real thought of actually buying any land or houses, but just wanted to kill time by getting shown around.

"I mean it," Jake warned the sun-shriveled opportunist.

Startled, Billie jerked away just in time to avoid losing a few of her claws. Jake's reversing her own car to within a few millimeters of the tiny MG's silvery fender further convinced her of Jake's seriousness; backing out fast, Jake spied the straw-yellow hair and bright scarf zooming away, already half a block distant.

All the way down Water Street, past bright banners snapping crisply in front of shops selling pottery and jewelry, postcards and crafts, Maine-made foods and boat rides, Jake kept reciting a single phrase to herself:
Let her be there.

She punched in Helen's number again. "Hi! This is Helen…"

Past the corner convenience store and the old granite post office building, past Rosie's Hot Dog Stand and the big new Coast Guard station on the breakwater, leaving the fishing boats in the boat basin behind and hurrying uphill:

Let her be there, and let me be an idiot who worries about nothing. Just…

Let her be there.

And … let her be okay.

Past the Chowder
House restaurant and the ferry dock, Water Street curved between old wood-frame houses in various stages of repair. Jake turned left on Clark Street and soon after that into a warren of packed-earth lanes that tourists never got to see.

Pulled up close to the lanes were tiny house trailers with built-on rooms and small, neat vegetable gardens fenced by big pieces of driftwood. Whitewashed stones edged the flower beds; odd sculptures clustered around some of the iron-railed front steps.

Earlier that summer, Ellie had brought Jake here to visit
Ellie's cousins, Charlotte and Edwina. Both their husbands were away with the National Guard, so the sisters were living together in Charlotte's trailer with their kids, all under age five.

Lee had come, too, to play with her young relatives, and Bella had arrived to help; passing the place now, Jake recalled the afternoon, full of diapers, sippy cups, and a steady procession of toddlers by turns either laughing or bawling their heads off, as one of the pleasantest of her life.

By the time they left, under Bella's hands that trailer had been so clean you could eat off any surface anywhere in it, even under the sink. While Jake fixed two leaky faucets, a loose doorknob, and a broken bedpost that in childish hands had threatened to become a deadly weapon, Ellie sang the kids to sleep. In the calm that followed, the pair of young moms sat looking shell-shocked, each with a glass of wine in one hand, a romance novel in the other, and a box of chocolates on the table between them.

A wonderful day; Jake wished it back as the lane narrowed, curving around an ancient apple tree shading a trio of leaning gravestones in the oldest section of Hillside Cemetery. At last the lane widened before the only house in the cul-de-sac beyond the burying place.

It was a small factory-built Cape with gray siding and white shutters, set on a concrete slab. Green-coated Cyclone fence made an enclosure of the backyard; inside it were toys and playground equipment. Jake shut the car off and got out.

"Hello?" But she could already tell that no one was around. Her heart rate quickened. "Helen?"

The baby-sitter's car wasn't here, either. At the top of the poured-concrete steps Jacobia shaded her eyes with her hands to peer through the screen door. No sound came from within.

The spicy aroma of a scented candle mingling with the sharp
smell of bleach drifted faintly through the screen's new mesh. On the wall over the kitchen table hung a framed sampler embroidered with the motto
No Matter Where I Serve My Guests It Seems They Like My Kitchen Best.

Crayon drawings were stuck haphazardly to the front of the refrigerator. A khaki cap with a Maine Guide badge stitched to it hung from a hook. A stack of manila folders imprinted with the legend
Maine Literacy Initiative
lay on the counter. Helen's mother, Jerrilyn, volunteered in the program, which gave individual— and, most importantly, confidential—tutoring to local adults who couldn't read and wanted to learn.

"Anyone home?" Jake tried the screen door: unlocked. It was possible that in the half hour since Jake spoke with her, Helen had managed to get Lee down for a nap, then fallen asleep, too. Maybe her mother had taken the car. But it was wildly unlikely.

Sturdy as a fireplug, with Ellie's gold-dust freckles and strawberry-blond hair, little Leonora White-Valentine was cute, charming—except for her biting habit—and so precocious, she'd already taught herself to read. But when it came to morning naps she was approximately as manageable as a Tasmanian devil.

Jake went in, crossed the kitchen to the back door, and peered out into the fenced yard: empty. Besides volunteering, Jerrilyn did hands-on outdoor work-Jake wasn't sure what— while Helen's stepfather, Jody Pierce, was a registered Maine Guide who made his living taking visitors on hunting and fishing trips. He also taught wilderness survival to folks who aspired to be Guides themselves, and he repaired electronic gear—global satellite positioners, depth finders, and radios—for working fishermen.